The problem with the WRT54GL is its limited flash memory size – only 4MB.
A compatible firmware needs to be smaller than 3866624 bytes to be flashable.

All of the the latest MIPSR1 MiniIPv6 images of Shibby’s Tomato are some bytes too big to fit the router. The last release which is flashable is the verison 107 from February 2013 and that one ships with a broken (as in non-functional) OpenSSL. ATTOW the latest version is 116, from January 2014, so I decided to make my own build of the latest version which fits the small flash area of the WRT54GL.

Changes compared to the official V116 of Shibby are:

Layer7 filtering removed to save space

Samba stuff removed to save space

Compiled OpenSSL with -DNO_OPENSSL_HEARTBEATS because of the Heartbleed bug

The MIPSR1 build is too big. The R2 one would fit. But I don’t know if I can flash the R2 on the WRT54GL. Do you have any information about that? On Shibby’s website it succinctly says “Older MIPSR1 routers are also supported” but when I google “WRT54GL MIPSR2” I see some threads about bricked devices. Any hints?

Man, I was excited to see this available for my WRT54GL! Total bummer for me though. It completely bricked my faithful router of several years :(

I just got a DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem as Comcast is forcing 2.0 EOL. Was really hoping this would help me avoid network rebuild. I have an ASUS RT-N66U in the Living Room that I had in Access Point Mode with my trusty WRT54GL on the front line. The power light just sadly blinks after this firmware upgrade fail :(

I’m using the WRT54G 3.1 with the 1.28 Tomato firmware. Are you still running your own firmware or are there any other? Do you think I should make any updates to my router or is it best to just leave it as it is?

I still use this one and I don’t think I will change in near future. This is a quite specific firmware (IPv6 capability at the cost of layer 7 filtering and network share support) – if you don’t exactly need/want this, of course running the default tomato firmware is fine too.

This bricked my router too, a WRT54GL v1.1. Started the update and just a few seconds later it displayed an “update failed” message, GUI was unresponsive, and after restarting the router the power light flashes, and it responds to pings, but has no open ports, and the 30+30+30 procedure is ineffective.

In writing the Ebay description and describing the above observations, I suddenly remembered that TFTP is a UDP protocol, which won’t be seen with a port scan. So I had a try at that method of restoring the router’s functionality and it now works again.

In doing so, I learned that the firmware which is flashed to the router via TFTP must be less than 3 MB in size, and apparently that is also true of any firmware that is flashed using the router’s default firmware’s “upgrade firmware” page. So I gave this firmware a second try, upgrading from the dd-wrt mini firmware that I now had installed, and it upgraded successfully and now works.

So it’s probably worth advising people that, before attempting to load this firmware into their router, they must first grab the “mini” version of dd-wrt and load that into their router if their router currently has the default firmware installed.

That said, AFAICT, the IPv6 support doesn’t work. Maybe it works for Hurricane Electric tunnels or something, but using the “DHCPv6 with Prefix Delegation” option on the IPv6 configuration page, the status page never lists any IPv6 address prefix it has acquired from my ISP.